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To cope with his dread, John Kitzhaber opened his leather-bound journal and began to write.
It was a little past 9 on the morning of Nov. 22, 2011. Gary Haugen had dropped his appeals. A Marion County judge had signed the murderer's death warrant, leaving Kitzhaber, a former emergency room doctor, to decide Haugen's fate. The 49-year-old would soon die by lethal injection if the governor didn't intervene.
Kitzhaber was exhausted, having been unable to sleep the night before, but he needed to call the families of Haugen's victims.
"I know my decision will delay the closure they need and deserve," he wrote.
The son of University of Oregon English professors, Kitzhaber began writing each day in his journal in the early 1970s. The practice helped him organize his thoughts and, on that particular morning, gather his courage.
Kitzhaber first dialed the widow of David Polin, an inmate Haugen beat and stabbed to death in 2003 while already serving a life sentence fo…

Make no mistake. India needs to step up and abolish death penalty

World's largest democracy remains firmly in the company of a minority of countries that swear by medieval practices.

As 2015 ends, the number of countries that have abolished the death penalty has risen by four. Although small in population, the four - Fiji, Madagascar, Mongolia and Surinam - have boosted the list of abolitionist countries beyond 100. Thus as 2016 dawns, the number of member states of the United Nations that have ditched the death penalty in law or in practice - the term "abolitionist in practice" meaning that a country has not executed anyone for so many years that it is deemed to have scrapped it for all intents and purposes - has grown closer to 150. Thus a majority of the world's states are consigning state-sponsored blood lust to history.

However, among the retentionist states are China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Japan, Pakistan and the United States, to name but a few: A mix of autocratic and supposedly democratic ones.

In India, the year had started on a positive note: in February the Allahabad High Court commuted to life the death sentence passed on SurinderKoli in the "Nithari Killings" case. Chief Justice DY Chandrachud and Justice PKS Baghel did not go into the merits of the case against Koli but limited themselves to the manner in which his mercy petitions were handled. (There is plenty of evidence to show that Koli was almost entirely innocent, that he was framed and that the real culprits who were most likely engaged in organ trade got off scot free thanks to poor investigation of the incident.)

In July, Yakub Memon, convicted in connection with the 1993 Bombay bombings was executed on his 53rd birthday, following a hasty post-midnight rejection of his mercy plea by the Supreme Court. He was hanged despite many eminent persons' pleas for sparing his life on the grounds that he had cooperated with the investigations, had provided useful information and had already spent more than two decades in jail. Incidentally, he was the third Muslim in a row to be put to death by the Indian state after the Pakistani Ajmal Kasab and the Kashmiri Afzal Guru (the latter most likely falsely implicated in connection with the 2001 Parliament attack but killed to satiate the "collective conscience of the society" as the Supreme Court infamously put it.)

Prior to Kasab's execution, there had been a kind of undeclared moratorium after the hanging of Dhananjoy Chatterjee in 2004. The People's Union for Democratic Rights earlier this year released an extensive report based on new research by Professors Probal Chaudhuri and Debasis Sengupta of the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, showing that Chatterjee was most likely framed.

No doubt, the possibility of hanging innocent people who lack competent legal counsel was one of the numerous reasons that persuaded the Law Commission to recommend that the death penalty be abolished for all crimes other than terrorism. The commission's concession to the retentionists in respect of terrorism was unfortunate. In India far too many people - as was the case most likely with Afzal Guru - are falsely accused of colluding with terrorists.

Last week, the Indian Parliament took another step towards medieval penology by passing the Juvenile Justice Bill providing for the possibility of treating as an adult a 16-year-old child - a result of mob demand for summary justice following the December 2012 gangrape in New Delhi - despite opposition from a large number of activists including feminists and feminist lawyers.

As 2015 ends, India remains firmly in the company of a minority of countries that swear by medieval practices. The current BJP-led government's proclivities are ante-diluvian. Human rights activists have their work cut out in mounting a robust opposition to this trend and to plead for leading the country in the direction of the majority of enlightened states that have ditched the death penalty and other cruel and inhuman punishments.

Civilized killingExecution is unlikely to be outlawed in India at the moment

Is anything new about this 'new' year for us ? Not in our way of punishing the guilty, or those thought to be guilty. Death has been ordered by the Ruler of India, over centuries. The way of executing has changed, but executing stays. As we enter 2016, it is instructive to see how and where the death penalty stood in 1516, 1616, 1716, 1816 and 1916. And where it stands, or how it drops into the scaffold's dark well, in 2016.

1516

Sikandar Lodi is enthroned in Delhi. A Persian scholar, he attempts versifications under the effete pen name of Gulrukhi, "Of Flower-like Countenance". He is fond of creating gardens, beautiful buildings. But he is a bigot and inflicts bigoted punishments. Notoriously, he has a sadhu called Bodhan burnt alive for saying Islam and Hindu dharma are equally acceptable to the creator.

Krishnadevaraya is king of Vijayanagara. A strong administrator, he is proud to be personally and politically tough. He believes his task is to preserve the dharma. But he "maintains the dharma by killing". Fernao Nuniz, a Portuguese traveller says of Krishnadevaraya's punishments: "Nobles who become traitors are sent to be impaled alive on a wooden stake thrust through the belly..."

Hundred years on, in 1616

The Mughal emperor, Jahangir, loves the arts, miniature painting, animals and birds. Mansur, the greatest of miniaturists, paints Jahangir's birds including the rare dodo. Jahangir's court dazzles. But he shows nothing of his father's - the great Akbar's - pluralism when he orders Guru Arjan Dev, the fifth Sikh Guru, to be executed. The Guru is tortured before being killed. Jahangir has earlier had his rebellious son, Khusrau, blinded. A painting of great sadness shows Khusrau being taken on elephant back past a row of his friends and followers impaled on stakes.

Vijayanagara is in its last gasp. The new king Sriranga II, in a palace coup led by Jagga Raya, is thrown into Vellore Fort prison with his entire family and put to death. The practice of royalty murdering its own kind is now established in India's north and south as a form of political power-games. Capital punishment is the preferred weapon.

Another hundred years later, by 1716

The Mughal Empire is in decline. It has not forgotten - how can it? - Aurangzeb's executions of his brothers, nephew, of Sarmad the Sufi saint, of Guru Teg Bahadur, of Sambhaji, head of the Maratha Confederacy. A grandson of Aurangzeb, Farrukhsiyar, is on the shaky throne. His grandfather's example before him, he has the incumbent Mughal vizier and several nobles executed in mere whimsy. And he orders the execution of the poet laureate Jafar Zattalli, on the assumption that he had composed poems critical of his regime. Banda Singh Bahadur, a Sikh leader of great courage and charisma, has established his authority in Punjab and won great renown as an abolisher of the zamindari and one who gave tillers proprietory rights. In 1716, Farrukhsiyar moves against Banda, captures him after a grim battle in Gurdaspur, brings him to Delhi, tortures and then executes him.

In the south, Vijayanagara has disintegrated and the Marathas are down. But the Peshwas are rising to the fore. There is something elevated about the Peshwa mind, but this does not redeem the Peshwa system of punishment which is carried out either by hanging the condemned man, cutting him to pieces or being decapitated. A further refinement includes breaking the skull under mallets. But Brahmins, if sentenced to death, are to be poisoned.

A further century on, by 1816

On the relics of a vanished Vijayanagara, a debilitated Mughal empire and a directionless Maratha conglomerate, India's new guest, Britain's East India Company, makes determining inroads. In 1799, the collector of Tinnevelly gives mouth-foaming chase to Kattabomman, the defiant ruler of Panchalankurichi and on capturing him, has him hanged from a tamarind tree. Several of Kattabomman's associates are also executed. 20 years on, in 1816, the example is still strong on every colonial and colonized mind.

Lord Hastings, as governor general of India by 1816, wants to be different. In the Maratha war that he wages, he exacts heavy casualties yet eschews bloody reprisals, retributive hangings and decapitations. But this is just for the now. A mere 40 years later, no more, after the Great Rebellion of 1857, the British Raj is also going to become merciless as a punisher. Savage, in fact, with the death penalty being its absolute favourite.

By 1916

The need to protect the colony from insurrection is seen as paramount. But the raj's brutality, post-1857, has raised such a stench that the mood in London is for punishment to be awarded lawfully, under a law, not capriciously or whimsically. The Indian Penal Code has come into effect in 1860, listing a number of 'capital offences' which include 'waging war against the State'. The Partition of Bengal and its reversal have seen a great new energy unleashed that threatens the raj with home-devised bombs and bullets. A Defence of India Act is brought into being in 1915. Hangings and firings are back. In London, Curzon Wyllie, the political aide-de- camp to the secretary of state for India, Lord George Hamilton, is assassinated on July 1, 1909, by the Indian revolutionary, Madan Lal Dhingra. And after a trial in the Old Bailey, an unrepentant Dhingra is hanged on August 19, 1909.

And, now, in 2016

Independent India has inherited capital punishment from its blood-smeared history. Its emancipating founders do not dispense with that 'king' of punishments. The first to be hanged in free India, within months of freedom, is Nathuram Godse, assassin of the Father of the Nation. The threat to 'high functionaries' remains great. Hangings have made no difference to that form of privileged crime, not to speak of humbler murders. Thanks to the Supreme Court's mature orders the death penalty is now ordered only in 'the rarest of rare' cases. Rajiv Gandhi's family saying that it does not believe in the death penalty has been hugely civilizing, as is the Indian Left's consistent support for its abolition. The forward logic of all this points to its abolition. But public opinion in India remains 'death-penalty minded'. Terrorism and the deaths of innocents at the hands of cynical cabals entrench that opinion, as does the brutal rape and murder, in Delhi, of Nirbhaya. The present Parliament of India too is similarly minded.

Many, very many, outside the State's anatomy but within its embrace, also want the death penalty to stay. Not just stay but stay tight and get tighter. They are like the ulema who goaded and then applauded medieval executions of 'unbelievers'. Bodhan, Sarmad and Zattalli were all killed by the Lodi and Mughal states for something like un-belief. Today's India is divided into 'believers' in bhakti and shakti on the one hand and those who believe in a liberal State on the other.

A wise and brave law commission, headed by the perspicacious judge, A.P. Shah, has recommended doing away with the death penalty. But it has said also that acts against the State, in other words, terrorists, should remain visitable by death.Terrorism has weighed on its recommendation.

In the three years of his incumbency, President Pranab Mukherjee has brought a glitter of his own to Rashtrapati Bhavan. Like Jahangir's menagerie, he has had the birds of his garden documented in a book, Winged Wonders of Rashtrapati Bhavan. And like that great Mughal, he has had to deal with, and deal, the death penalty. Three persons found guilty of terrorist acts, have gone to the gallows under the ink of his pen. More await his decision.

The law does not, will not, tolerate acts against the State. But will the Indian State let go of the death penalty, a grand perquisite of authority, be it imperial, colonial or republican? Unlikely. We may not burn, decapitate, crush heads under mallets as before but we will 'hang by the neck till death'. We may not put needles through eyes, we will use other means of the third degree in thanas. We are not uncivilized.

What, then, is new about 2016?

Nothing?

Not so.

Over the frenzy and the froth, there are those, neither insignificant in numbers nor in stature, who are thinking what Amartya Sen said in Delhi just the other day to a hall packed to overflowing: Killing for killing is like the market economy - a system of exchange. We are under a market economy; we need not be under a market scaffold.

Most Viewed (Last 7 Days)

Organizers of an anti-death penalty coalition say they have delivered over 56,000 petition signatures to New Hampshire Republican Gov. Chris Sununu, urging him to sign a bill to repeal the state’s capital punishment law.
Sununu has vowed to veto the bill, saying he stands with crime victims and members of the law enforcement community.
Before presenting the signatures, the New Hampshire Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty held a news conference Thursday where family members of murder victims spoke in favor of repealing the death penalty.
The bill was passed by the House and Senate.
It is unclear whether they have a two-thirds majority of votes in both chambers, which is needed to override vetoes. Source: The Associated Press, May 17, 2018

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The high school junior accused of gunning down 10 students and teachers at a Santa Fe school is facing a capital murder charge - but he’ll never face the death penalty, even in Texas.
Though Dimitrios Pagourtzis was charged as an adult and jailed without bond, even if he’s found guilty he can’t be sentenced to death because of a 2005 U.S. Supreme Court ruling. And in the Lone Star State, he can’t be sentenced to life without parole as the result of a 2013 law that banned the practice for minors.
“In Texas, after the Supreme Court’s decision, they passed a law that basically says that it’s a life sentence if you’re under 18 at the time of the crime,” said attorney Amanda Marzullo, executive director of Texas Defender Services. “The Court has said that it is cruel and unusual to execute an individual who is under 18 at the time of the offense.”
The Santa Fe High School student admitted to the mass shooting that killed 10 and wounded 10 others early Friday, according to court documents.…

31 years ago, on May 20, 1987, just before midnight, I was sitting in the witness area of the Mississippi Gas Chamber watching someone die in front of me. His name was Edward Earl Johnson.
I am both sad and glad that Edward’s final two weeks, right up to his agonising death, were recorded in Paul Hamann’s extraordinary BBC documentary Fourteen Days in May. Sad, because from time to time I find myself forced to relive that horror, when I watch the film at some public event; glad, because at least Edward’s senseless death has had positive repercussions – the film inspiring many to take up the battle for people in his precarious predicament.
Yet it irks me beyond measure that people who should know better use their position of power to prognosticate that the justice system never executes the innocent. For example, in a case called Kansas v. March, in 2006, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia loudly proclaimed that there is not “a single case — not one — in which it is clear that a…

How much does the public have a right to know about how the state of Indiana executes people?
It is a question that, effectively, strikes at the heart of capital punishment. And it's the issue in a 4-year-old case in Marion Circuit Court that started with a public records request by Washington attorney A. Katherine Toomey to the Indiana Department of Corrections (DOC).
"If we win ... the Indiana public will know more about one of the most consequential areas of decision making that the state of Indiana engages in," attorney Peter Racher said in an interview.
The state, however, sees it as contrary to a state law limiting what the public can see pertaining to executions. The law was controversial because of how it passed. After midnight on the final day of the 2017 legislative session, it was added to a budget bill, two pages out of 175.
"The budget is now a death penalty bill," Rep. Matt Pierce, D-Bloomington, said at the time. "There's been no public…

(CNN) - An Australian woman has been sentenced to death by hanging after a Malaysian court overturned an earlier acquittal of drug smuggling charges.
According to CNN affiliate Sky News, a three-judge panel unanimously threw out the previous ruling in 54-year-old Maria Elvira Pinto Exposto's case.
The grandmother and mother of four was arrested in December 2014 while transiting through the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur on a flight from Shanghai to Melbourne, according to another CNN affiliate, SBS News.
She was found in possession of 1.1 kilos (2.4 lb) of crystal methamphetamine and faced a mandatory death penalty under Malaysia's draconian drugs laws.
Exposto claimed she had no knowledge of the drugs in her bag and had been scammed by a boyfriend she met online.
According to SBS, Exposto's lawyers said she had gone to Shanghai to file documents in relation to her boyfriend's retirement from service in the US army. When she left China, Exposto claimed she was handed …

The lawyers fighting the death penalty ordered for a former Northmont High School student want the Ohio Supreme Court to reconsider its affirmation of the sentence and scheduling of the execution.
Austin Myers' lawyers said in a motion filed this morning that they want the state's highest court to overturn the conviction and call a new trial "or in the alternative that his sentence be modified to life without parole."
Myers, 23, is still apparently the 2nd youngest on Ohio's death row 3 1/2 years after being sentenced for the murder of childhood friend Justin Back, 18, of Wayne Twp., Warren County.
Last Thursday, the court affirmed the death penalty for Myers, for the stabbing death of Back at his home outside Waynesville in January 2014.
The execution was scheduled for July 20, 2022 in the decision.
Warren County prosecutor David Fornshell was pleased with the 7-0 ruling by the state's highest court.
"The 7-0 decision is always something you like to se…

Defendant claims firefighters didn't try hard enough to extinguish blaze
The nanny responsible for killing 4 members of a family in an arson appeared in court in eastern China on Thursday to appeal her death sentence.
Mo Huanjing, nanny of the family of Lin Shengbin, pleaded guilty to starting the fire. But she said during the appeal at Zhejiang High People's Court that "the penalty in the original ruling was extremely heavy".
"The tragedy wasn't the result I wanted to see," she added. She said the efforts of firefighters were flawed. And she confessed to her offense during the initial interrogation, which could be regarded as a reason to earn a more lenient sentence.
Wu Pengbin, her lawyer, told China Daily that some firefighters and employees of the property management department of Lin's apartment attended the hearing as witnesses at his urging.
"I wanted them to show what they were doing at the time to the court, as I, with my client, thoug…

To cope with his dread, John Kitzhaber opened his leather-bound journal and began to write.
It was a little past 9 on the morning of Nov. 22, 2011. Gary Haugen had dropped his appeals. A Marion County judge had signed the murderer's death warrant, leaving Kitzhaber, a former emergency room doctor, to decide Haugen's fate. The 49-year-old would soon die by lethal injection if the governor didn't intervene.
Kitzhaber was exhausted, having been unable to sleep the night before, but he needed to call the families of Haugen's victims.
"I know my decision will delay the closure they need and deserve," he wrote.
The son of University of Oregon English professors, Kitzhaber began writing each day in his journal in the early 1970s. The practice helped him organize his thoughts and, on that particular morning, gather his courage.
Kitzhaber first dialed the widow of David Polin, an inmate Haugen beat and stabbed to death in 2003 while already serving a life sentence fo…

Concerns about Texas' dwindling lethal injection supplies coupled with questions about the age of the drugs have some advocates wondering whether the state is prepared to humanely carry out its recent uptick in scheduled executions.
Texas currently has 8 death dates and 9 doses of its execution drug - compounded sodium pentobarbital - for use in the Huntsville death chamber. What's more, a string of contradictory records from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice raises questions about whether some of those doses could be 3 years old, far older than previously reported and old enough that experts worry it could increase the chances of a "torturous" execution.
"The older the drug the greater the likelihood of a botched execution. Period," said Maurie Levin, a death penalty lawyer with experience in lethal injection litigation. "It becomes contaminated, corrupted, impotent, and all of those things can lead to a torturous execution."
In response …

Texas executed Juan Castillo, who said he was innocent, for 2003 San Antonio murder
A Texas death row inmate was executed Wednesday — his 4th execution date in a year. Though advocates and his attorneys insisted on Juan Castillo's innocence, he lost all his fights in court and was put to death for a 2003 San Antonio murder.
Juan Castillo was put to death Wednesday evening, ending his death sentence on his 4th execution date within the year.
The 37-year-old was executed for the 2003 robbery and murder of Tommy Garcia Jr. in San Antonio.
The execution had been postponed three times since last May, including a rescheduling because of Hurricane Harvey.
Castillo's advocates and attorneys had insisted on his innocence in Garcia’s murder, pleading unsuccessfully for a last-minute 30-day stay of execution from Republican Gov. Greg Abbott after all of his appeals were rejected in the courts.
The Texas Defender Service, a capital defense group who had recently picked up Castillo’s cas…

DPN opposes the death penalty in all cases, unconditionally, regardless of the method chosen to kill the condemned prisoner. The death penalty is inherently cruel and degrading, an archaic punishment that is incompatible with human dignity. To end the death penalty is to abandon a destructive diversionary and divisive public policy that is not consistent with widely held values. The death penalty not only runs the risk of irrevocable error, it is also costly to the public purse as well as in social and psychological terms.The death penalty has not been proved to have a special deterrent effect. It tends to be applied in a discriminatory way on grounds of race and class. It denies the possibility of reconciliation and rehabilitation. It prolongs the suffering of the murder victim's family and extends that suffering to the loved ones of the condemned prisoner. It diverts resources that could be better used to work against violent crime and assist those affected by it. Death Penalty News is a privately owned, non-profit organization. It is based in Paris, France.Your donations to Death Penalty News DO make a difference.